Ontology for cultural heritage

Ontology engineering is an interdisciplinary research field across computer science, data science, philosophy, linguistic, and cognitive science. Its core purpose is the development of models - called ontologies - aimed at representing what exists in (a portion of) reality according to certain communities. Since ontologies commonly take the form of logical theories, another way to look at them is as vocabularies of terms whose intended meanings are explicitly and formally stated. Nowadays ontologies play a fundamental role for managing data and to make them findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).

The purpose of the talk is to introduce some ideas about ontology engineering by focussing on my research contribution in the area of Digital Humanities. I will in particular discuss some modelling challenges in the context of heritage modelling with specific reference to scholarly editing and musicology.